How d'you do, Arcane fandom?

Just rewatched the series for the third time, with a focus on Jinx and Silco's dynamic, and of course the muse whispered darkly in my ear. I find theirs to be a relationship of intense ambiguity. It's tender, but also deeply twisted and toxic. On the one hand, Silco was exactly who Jinx needed, or vice versa. On the other hand, they literally brought out the worst in each other, and self-destructed before our very eyes. Yet there is no doubt the love was real, and ever present.

This piece is a two-parter, and plays with their evolution as parent and child, but also as two equally lethal monsters in their own right. It's something of a mixed bag: character study, angst, fluff and all the general drama in between.

Tw: for drug use, eye horror, gore, mistreatment of sex workers, language, mentions of suicide, indirect mentions of rape and incest, and general criming.

A bigger tw for fucked-up child-parent dynamics. Jinx has no boundaries; Silco sets none—and they're horrific to everyone around them, if not to each other.

Feedback is adored, especially if we can analyze these two nutjobs together! :3

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

~D.H Lawrence

Silco's schedule is nocturnal: a supercharged monstrosity fed by sluicings of blood, drugs and bonemeal.

By dusk, a meeting with the chem-barons at literal knifepoint. By midnight, a double-crossing slumlord disemboweled via an old-fashioned gutting. By dawn, a cut-glass decanter of blended whisky on his desk, a stack of trade edicts signed off with whiplike flourishes of his wrist, and a dose of Shimmer stabbed right into his eye.

By daybreak, Silco is bone-tired with the bitter pleasures of a night well-spent. In fifteen minutes, he will put the paperwork away and summon Sevika to outline tomorrow's agenda. In another thirty minutes, he will descend to the Last Drop's bar, ordering Thieram to dole out a celebratory round for yesterday's dockside raid. After forty minutes, he will retire to his private quarters, on the cusp of the purest epiphany of his life.

He has every detail mapped out—except that last part.

He is a pragmatic man, a man of habit. He sets no store by epiphanies. In the Lanes, such phenomena are as exotic as loyalty or destiny or fresh air.

A hardcore survivalist sets bloodthirstier goals.

Sitting at his desk, Silco lets schemes darkly slither through his brainstem (Old routes; new Shimmer strains). The scent of cigar smoke and gunpowder clings heavily in the weave of his worsted suit (Dead liabilities; good meetings). A patina of dust motes floats above his desk, irradiated green by the smog. (Burn in Hell, Piltover; sweet dreams, Zaun.)

The Undercity's schedule is as nocturnal as his. A colossus relegated to the darkest waters, and yet nourished by its own miasmic glow.

Blood. Drugs. Bonemeal.

As a boy, Silco had mapped out every crack and crest of the city. But the river Pilt, twisting through the terrain like a gashed artery, had seeped forever into his muscle-memory.

Together with Vander, he'd slinked along its shores for black-market scraps, guided by the primitive sonar of sumpsnipes. In their adolescence, they'd scrubbed off the detritus from the mines in the riverbanks, soot clogging their nostrils and clumping their hair. As teenagers, their gang of bashers had jumped Pilties by the crossing, robbing them blind and leaving them riven with knife-wounds. As young men, they'd helped the riverman fish bodies out of the headwaters in exchange for coins—drunks, dead babies, disposed evidence.

Finally, Silco had joined their ranks, at Vander's hands.

Memory is a distorting medium. Yet that night holds a dreamlike clarity—a furor of moon-silvered steel and tendrils of blood in bilgewater.

For months afterward, Silco tasted it through every ragged breath from his lungs. Shivering and feverish, he'd lain in his cot in Singe's dingy little lab, the foul air singing over his chipped teeth. The convalescence had melted all the muscles off his limbs. Yet it felt like sloughing off a false outer layer: what sat beneath was as malignant as the Pilt itself.

Imagine: a deepwater predator in the dimensionless dark. Impervious to pressure, immune to poison, it burrowed into the viscera of other creatures. Once they were consumed, inside out, it arose fully-formed, a thing of alien contours and hard-bitten malevolence.

Small wonder everyone was shocked by his survival. More shocking for how unrecognizable it left him.

The river's toxins had eaten away the flap of skin covering his eye. Stained his iris and cornea to hemoglobin-red hues, darkening the sclera to the blackness of ink. The surface of his face was no better: scarred and pitted as the streets of Zaun.

And, day by day, the rot keeps spreading.

Habitually, Silco reaches for his silver-backed cigar case. Bootlegged, like everything of quality in the Undercity. But the brand is worth the trouble. Noxian molasses with a smooth burn. One of his few indulgences: a daily dose of anti-Zen.

His hands—spindly and sharp-knuckled, the nails buffed to a high shine—make short work of clipping the cigar. He lights up, puffing the cherry to life, exhaling a rippling smoke ring. A dark blot on his cuff catches his eye. He touches it, and his fingertips come away filmed in blood.

Tch.

Silco dips his fingers in his whisky glass, absently swirling. He must remind Sevika to stop decapitating skulls while he's in close range.

Arterial blood geysers everywhere. The stains are a bitch to dryclean.

In the next beat, he nearly scoffs—what fastidiousness! Like a Piltie lordling lately, isn't he? His suits tailored, his hands manicured, his hair smooth-slicked and smelling of bergamot.

True, Silco had rubbed shoulders with Topside's ilk once. Aped their accent; donned their costume. But those were his fallow years before the uprising. Pamphlets and impassioned oratory at Bridgeside; no mass riots or molotov cocktails or a three-year prison spell for inciting a mob into manslaughtering an Enforcer—yet.

Oh, but I certainly seized the brass ring, didn't I?

In those days, the Academy still accepted Undercity students inside its ivory gates. Silco was granted a scholarship at the business school—a charity case to meet the Warden's quota. He'd been self-taught, the cutthroat erudition earned in the sumps. But he'd read whatever he could get his hands on. His memory was a steel-trap on which his words honed their edge. Quota or no, he'd leapt at the chance to prove himself.

A man was entitled to act a fool at least once in his life.

He'd been a revolutionist even then: carrying his resentment against Topside like a pebble in his boot. But he'd let himself be governed by their rules of fair play. He believed Zaun could be won through a battle of refined wills rather than dirty warfare. Believed he could drag himself, and his peers, out of the gutter by beating Topside at their own game.

Except the game was rigged from the start. At every turn, he'd been an outcast: no money, no connections, no prospects. His anti-bourgeois backtalk had attracted madly uneven fights with upper-crust boys. His gaunt-faced gruffness had repelled the girls. Patrons turned up their noses at backing a third-class sump-rat, regardless of the scope of his talents. He had nothing in common with them anyway: these privileged scions who drove around in chauffeured cars and holidayed at five-star-resorts. By day, they lazed about in penthouses acquired with their families' wealth. By night, they went to dance parlors with painted dollymops on their arms and coins jingling in their pockets.

Meanwhile, beneath their feet, Zaun boiled alive in a cauldron of glowing green poison.

It wasn't as if Topside could claim ignorance. They knew what lurked belowground. Daily, the newspapers deprecated the Undercity's decline. The fetid air and foul water. The spikings of cancers, infections and malformations. Piltover's factories left the river so polluted, women sprouted fatal tumors beneath their breasts (like his mother). Men died of seizures from the air's contagions (like his father). Babies were ridden with coughs; their milkwater was dosed with alcohol to keep the little wretches under (like Silco).

Topside knew. They just didn't give a tinker's damn.

To them, Zaun deserved to sink into the depths of inertia. Its denizens were misfits and madmen, pariahs and predators. They belonged at the river-bottom, thrashing together in a chum-cage of frenzy.

To Silco, it should've been the opposite.

Every creature plays the game of survival to win. They fight and feed and fuck their way to the top of the evolutionary ladder, emerging as the fittest versions of themselves. For Zaunites, it is a biological imperative. The Undercity unhinges them, unmakes them, but never breaks them.

They are creatures bred on sheer stubbornness; perfect in their element.

But what of the creatures forged on softness rather than bonemeal? Creatures whose every need is catered to, every obstacle in their path eliminated? Silco pictures a useless blob of an organism, like a softboiled egg. He thinks of the Topsiders, with their carapace of wealthy decadence, and the putrid weakness it hides beneath.

Yet they lay claim to the cream of the crop, leaving the Undercity with pitcherfuls of their piss.

Yet from the ashes.

We will rise.

Silco sips his whiskey, tasting nothing but rage. It is a cold effervescence in his skull and a carved-out hollowness behind his ribs.

He'd felt it before, after the failed uprising. After the mass arrests and mugshots; the Academy expulsion and the prison term. After he'd returned belowground, his psyche outlined in a corrosive new aggression that burned like acid, to learn Vander had traded his gauntlets for two girls. Traded power for a playpen, pathetic and patently phony.

The Vander in Silco's memory was a different man—a dynamo of ferocity. He used to laugh all the time, a ragged-edged rumble like a wolf's howl.

Silco loved his brother's laugh. The sound embodied Zaun in all its indomitable force.

But Vander had changed since the uprising. Fatherhood ground him down, ruthlessly reducing him to the bone. The status-quo stomped out his aspirations the same way. It was like he wanted to live squashed beneath the shape of an Enforcer's boot-print. Wanted to make amends—

For what?

For daring to dream? For demanding respect as our due?

Silco drops the cigar into his ashtray. Smoke twists slowly through the neon-lit air. His rage is slower to dissipate—at the Topsiders, at Vander, at the sheer fucking senselessness of their world. A world where a legend could be dragged to heel like a lapdog. Hound of the Underground; now the Piltie pork's best friend.

Beg for scraps. Roll over. Play dead.

That was what Piltover expected of those belowground. What they expected of Vander. And what he, in turn, wanted from Silco.

They'd exchanged angry words over it—so many times. Gone around and around it, raging, rationalizing, reasoning. When words failed, they'd settled it as proper Zaunites: with a bare-knuckled brawl.

He'd never expected Vander to pull a knife on him.

Before their struggle, Silco had little cause to question his own toughness. It was an aspect of his matrix, tattooed into his DNA, like the choppy ends of his hair or his oft-broken nose. Strength was never his forte. His brand of pugilism was cerebral—quicksilver wit and precision hits. But if push came to shove, he was as spry as any sumpsnipe, with a slicing undercut and body that bladed itself like a pane of steel.

Talents that held him in fine stead—until he crossed Vander, with his golem-like force and his bone-grinding fists and a bloodlust that blinded him beyond recourse.

Blinding Silco—fatally—in turn.

Afterward, Silco understood that his old brand of toughness, the headstrong fast-talking grit that served him in the Lanes, wasn't enough to best an enemy that outclassed you in every dimension. Certainly not enough to topple Topside down. To live—no, thrive—he would need a sharklike cunning kept hidden like a knife up the sleeve. That was how victory was won: not with a pair of gauntlets but a Gotcha.

That night, Vander stole not just his eye. He stole Silco's last shred of innocence.

Decades later, Silco stole everything, to square the blood-debt.

He feels no remorse on that score. He's whitened his mind and blackened out his heart. In the Fissures, nothing is achieved without spilt blood. Every blind corner holds a risk; every smile a lie. He's grown used to it, the way he's grown used to the lung-tarring smoke in the byways and the decomposing corpses on the cobblestones. Grown used to molding this city in his palms: a warped and glowing mass of Topside's worst nightmares.

Blood. Drugs. Bonemeal.

And a shot of chaos to Jinx it up.

Above, in the rafters: the faintest creak. A draft? No—the skittering of a spider-girl.

Silco doesn't glance up. He drains his glass and sets it aside. On its patterned surface, he sees a refraction of light. The point of an eyetooth, star-bright in the shadows.

A smile.

No alarm sounds off—in Silco's head, in his office. His visitor is expected, and welcomely so. His is not the only nocturnal schedule. He surrounds himself with species who go slithering into the night. Some serve a base purpose: bait, bandits, bruisers. Others are prized for their subtlety: snitches, saboteurs, seeing-eyes. Altogether they are a thousand disparate cogs pumping away inside the behemoth chassis of a vehicle with a singular goal—Zaun.

And in their midst?

The combustible element. Flammable down to its molecules, a catalyst and a cataclysm in the same breath.

(Daredevil, daydreamer, daughter.)

Silco smiles, an incremental twitch at the edge of his scarred lip. Then he glances at his pocketwatch. His good humor leeches away: an exsanguination in double-time. Flicking the switch under his desk, he summons Sevika.

His epiphany is eighty-five minutes away.

Shortly afterward, Silco descends the stairs into the purplish twilight of the bar.

Sevika lumbers behind him: a heavy tread and a steady glower. She'd prefaced the earlier meeting with predictable grumblings about Jinx. Something about stringing a garland of grenades around an informant, a potential asset, now a pile of smoking entrails, etcetra etcetera.

Silco listened with half-a-ear for the first five heartbeats, dismissed the rest with a wave of his cigar-hand, then tersely got down to business.

Sevika was none too pleased. Not that he gives a shit.

There has never been any love lost between her and Jinx. Years ago, Jinx went through the awkward motions of apology by baking Sevika a cupcake for blowing off her arm. Sevika had swung her good fist past the cupcake and cracked Jinx in the teeth. Then she'd eaten the cupcake—and gotten deliriously sick. Apparently, the icing held traces of toxic mushroom. When Silco interrogated them both afterward, each girl fobbed off her own wrongdoing as an accident.

Since then, Silco has stopped brokering peace between them. Better to take their antagonism as a given, and let them vie against each other. For Zaun, their rivalry begets results. And truth told—he finds it morbidly amusing: his left-hand is a bludgeon, his right-hand a wrecking-ball. The ends they serve are not entirely dissimilar.

Yet the value of his left-hand is quantifiable. His right? Irreplaceable.

The dancefloor exists in a perma-twilight of warped color spectrums. Red, blue, green. Blacklights glow along the floor like the bioluminescence of a cultivair's night-garden. The place is packed with the swelter of bodies: chem-barons dressed to the nines, gas-masked sex tourists on the prowl, factory owners nursing pitchers of black-market draft.

The music kicks a kinetic beat. On the elevated stage, dancers undulate with eellike choreography. No locals—most of the talent are imported from Ionia or thereabouts. A win-win. Poverty and language barriers keep them pliable, while reeling in jaundiced clients with a taste for exotic flesh.

Silco knows them by name: the dancers and their clientele. The latter: through business, blackmail, or a hybrid of the two. The former: because Sevika keeps a rotation of new girls (or a strapping swain of a boy) visiting his office at dawn.

Silco may be wedded to his work with an ascetic's fervor. But self-denial is for suckers. Sharing a roof with a nightclub opens up a fascinating calendar of opportunities for circling fresh prey. Sometimes multiple opportunities in the same day. A monster takes his due, and his pound of flesh.

With each boy or girl, Silco roots out the last morsel of innocence left intact—and devours it.

With no particular haste, he stalks toward the bar. The occupants give him a wide berth. Everyone knows his gait, half-predatory, half-prowling, and the menace lurking at its depths.

No tipsy barfly totters upto him; no drunken sot bumps chests with him. The Last Drop is no longer that sort of place. Under Vander, it had a waggish charm, but it was barely a handful of rungs above the lowest tavern. A place of hard-scrubbed surfaces and stained wood, where miners and layabouts alike sat elbow-to-elbow and drank the cheapest swill on tap.

Under Silco, the Last Drop is of a higher caliber altogether: a connoisseur's playground. In its VIP booths, the balance of power is painstakingly bartered between magnates and murderers. In its cacophonous fleshpits, that same power is checkmated in an eyeblink by more tangible temptations.

Blood. Drugs. Bonemeal.

Silco sits at his usual spot, in the heart of the dark. Sevika takes her place behind him. Above, in the ceiling's fluorescent gridwork, there are no shadows. But Silco fancies the pale coils of limbs twisting down the girders to flow silkily into the dance-pit. His girl at her games.

(Ward, weapon, wonder.)

Again, Silco nearly smiles.

Thieram, spotting him, drops whatever he is doing and hurries over. Before he arrives, Silco languidly holds up a hand at shoulder level. Thieram nods, and backs off the way he came.

Five minutes later, the bar is deluged with Noxian rum. The fallout leaves a grin on each lackey's face and a shot in his gut.

Silco accepts their toasts with good grace. His shadowy corner has morphed into a gravity well: the Drop's denizens fall into its inevitable pull. He's succeeded by tapping into veins—financial, psychological, emotional. He knows the value of staying attuned to the hearts and minds of those below him, creating a power-base with himself at the pinnacle. One by one, his po-mo circus pays their dues—chem-barons, cutthroats, counterfeiters. Each one puts on a show, be it long-lashed Corina gifting him with an orb of snapdragons to curry favor, or gold-jawed Finn lighting Silco's cigar with a cockiness that belies his slow-boiling insecurity.

With each person, Silco puts on a show in turn—a balancing act of binaries, light and dark. With some, he projects a benevolent magnetism. He chitchats about the goings-on in their clandestine world: allies on lockdown, or at large, or those who have died midway. He congratulates their shared wins, and commiserates over their common nuisances. He singles out those who are more interested in brokering business deals than in shoot-outs—less mess means less expense. In all ways, he is incisive civility, wielding control through a soft-spoken blend of patience, good listening, the occasional edict and a couple of well-timed blades to the jugular.

With others, he lets the veneer of civility peel away to disgorge a creature of feral intellect and festering rage. There's a saying in the Lanes. Learn, or get taught. Either way works for Silco, and fear is a stimulant that his fine-tuned senses are drawn to like blood. No chitchats or commiseration here. He zeroes in on the rabble-rousers and gives them back their own blunt language, the slithering edges of his accent dissolving into the dimensionless dirt of the Lanes. His pithy warning drains the blood from a dealer's ruddy face. His brute ultimatum leaves a chem-baron's eyes bulging from his sockets as if a terrible pressure is sucking them out.

Afterward, Silco smokes his cigar with relish. This game always satisfies him—fighting without fists. But a decent opponent is getting harder to find.

"World keeps closing in," he says.

Sevika grunts. "Downright claustrophobic."

"The downsides of living in a pressure cooker."

"Or a zoo. Not that I've been to any."

He exhales a mouthful of smoke. "I have."

"Uppside? Must've been a sight."

"It was. The green stretched out for acres. Trees, pools, flowers. The works. It's the law, you know. The animals must have enough natural habitat to graze. Otherwise they go rabid—fighting over food, mutilating their mates, devouring their young."

Sevika hums mock-thoughtfully. "Sounds familiar. Except the last bit."

"The Undercity devours its young plenty."

Sevika's dragon-eyes travel past him to the dancefloor. "It oughtta expand its diet."

Silco follows her stare.

At the paraquat stage, a bevy of clubbers are grinding together. Boys, girls, pros, amateurs. Tarts on a tea-tray—as the phrase goes.

In their center is a girl, all of seventeen, twirling to a rhythm only she can hear. Her body, beneath artfully-torn clothes, is lithe as a gymnast. When she laughs, she shows a tongue-tip stained hot-pink with candyfloss. Braids spiral in tandem with her movements—Rapunzel-long and eye-poppingly blue.

Unblinking, Silco clocks the braids. But it isn't the casual eyefuck of a connoisseur with his wares. His intensity is the opposite of predacious.

A plunge down the escape-hatch of memory.

Six years—how time flies! Yet he sees her clearly. Jinx—his Jinx—as she will always be. A live grenade of a girl, all fire and flux to his bilgewater and brimstone. He remembers their first meeting at the factory. The blistering explosion. The afterbirth of spilled shimmer and strewn corpses. The girl in the rain: blood-scummed and bawling like a newborn flung from Hell.

Everybody expected him to fob her off to the foundling house. It was the smartest recourse. A crimelord's den was no place for a child. Especially one so unhinged. The streets were already a-buzz with rumors about her.

She killed her family. She's bad luck. Busted in head.

A jinx.

So be it, Silco thought. The world was full of broken scraps and bad seeds. He was one of them. It was hardly the worst fate in the world. Ruthlessness was how you evened the odds. Didn't matter how strong or smart your adversaries were. If you learnt to outmaneuver them through sheer scope of savagery, the game was won.

He didn't kick the girl to the curb. No mercy-kill via poison or strangulation. Instead he did the unthinkable. Adopted her. The day of Vander's funeral, his gang stormed The Last Drop on Silco's orders. They made brutally short work of its occupants—die-hards who hadn't foreseen the irrevocable shift in the sand.

The chimes above the door tinkled when Silco stepped inside, hand-in-hand with Jinx. The customers gawked at them from beneath the dripping curtains of their own blood. Silco paid them no mind. He followed Jinx upstairs, to Vander's fireproof safe. She cracked the code in five minutes; he seized the Last Drop's deed alongside Powder's birth certificate.

The next day, her old name was struck off the dotted line.

"Choose a new one," he told her.

They were sitting together at a café in the Promenade level. The girl clutched a triple layer sandwich in both hands. Her nails were polished the color of blue-and-pink gumballs from the salon (a treat while Silco collected dues from the owner).

He watched her devour the sandwich in a twinkling. Typical. Sumpsnipes were born half-starved. Silco's own body remembered that hunger, blind and bottomless and biting endlessly into his gut. But the Pilt's baptism had left his inner-thermostat on the fritz: low metabolism, lower appetite.

Ironic, now that he could feast like a Piltie pig at trough.

Pushing his own plate her way, Silco went on, "Everybody in the Lanes knew Vander. They knew you were Vander's girl."

He couldn't bring himself to say Vander's daughter. There was a hushed-up drama in the sisters' past. Their freewheeling whiz of a mother had worked as a gadgeteer for Benzo. She and Vander were briefly lovers. Vi was born that same year. Shortly after, a different man entered the picture. Nine months later, out popped Powder.

They were all dead now. The tangled truths of bloodline died with them. But the emptiness let reinvention take root. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all.

"Vander's gone," Silco said. "So are all the rest. I'm all you have. Your new family. You deserve a new name to go with it."

"I'm yours," she repeated, her quiet tone difficult to parse.

"That's right."

"So I can be anyone I want?"

A strange way to phrase it. Silco let it go, and nodded.

"Reinvention has its uses," he said. "Especially after what you've endured. The world will try to put you in a box. If you accept, you are doomed. Better to craft an identity of your own choice, one with no boundaries. Ex cineribus resurgam, and all that."

"Ex cinnamon bun what?"

Silco didn't smile. But he felt a tug at his lips, muscles resisting their own impulse. "It means 'From the ashes, I rise."

"Like fireproofing?"

"Like a phoenix."

She bit her lip. Her body was deathly still—no fidgeting hands or kicking feet. Yet Silco sensed something inside her, a dormancy bubbling to life.

Then—

"Jinx."

"Hm?"

"I want to be Jinx."

There it was. The wrath sparking in the shadowy pits of her big eyes. He was accustomed to seeing them either blankly dazed or sheened in tears. Now the blown-out pupils made their blueness seem almost black; a viperfish's eyes. He felt the emotion radiating off her, marrow-deep—the electric fire that would shape her into the girl she would soon become.

Another deepwater creature, guided by the fevery glow of her own kindling.

(Madcap, marvel, monster.)

"So you will be," he said. "My very own. My Jinx."

Her eyes went from dark to bright. Impulsively, she reached across the table and grabbed his hand. The touch shot a frisson of shock up his arm, simultaneous with a flaring warmth in his chest—a combination that Silco, even with his history of pins and philters and physical peculiarities, had never felt before.

Carefully, he curled his long fingers through hers. She squeezed, and held on tight.

Since that day, they were inseparable. They took their breakfasts together in his quarters—black coffee for him and multilayered pancakes with confetti sprinkles for her. She tinkered with her gadgetry in his office, bouncing off the papered walls and expensive furniture like an improperly housetrained cat. At clockwork intervals, she injected him with Shimmer, her scattershot senses coalescing into a moment of sharp-eyed steadiness. At bedtime, she would nestle in his lap, listening to the impersonal burr of his voice as he narrated the exploits of their expanding empire from the newspaper.

Even now, Silco recalls with vividness the featherlight weight of her. Her urchin's hands curled into the fabric of his coat. Her hair like a pinwheel, blue tufts tickling his chin. She told him later that Vi used to cut it for her. She couldn't do it herself—she was scared of scissors.

Silco never took her to the hairdresser. It might frighten her, someone flying at her with a metallic snip-snip of blades. Her nerves were already taut as a violin's strings. The least provocation broke her into a symphony of self-abuse. Slamming her fists at her skull, clawing her arms and legs. Sometimes her screams would spike to the operatic pitch of vocal-cord rupture—ShutupshutupSHUTUP!

Silco had mastered his gorge like a sword-swallower. But those episodes were intensely disquieting. Worse …they shamed him. Because he couldn't ease them. Couldn't exorcise her ghosts. That was how he pictured it. Those ghosts massing into a tumor inside his girl: gelid and ungrippable. Something he must seek out and destroy—before it destroyed her in the worst possible moment.

Some nights, he imagined making an incision at her temple with his pen-knife. He'd find and pulp out that blasted tumor. Stamp it with his boot-heel until it burst.

Hush, my lovely. They can't hurt you now.

Not a generous bone in his body. Yet for Jinx he'd try anything. The way he saw it, they were more than a misfit pairing of father and daughter. They were kindred spirits. Partners-in-crime. In betrayal.

In blood.

Eventually, Jinx's episodes grew more sporadic. But they never abated. Nor did her fear of haircuts. Silco let her grow her hair out. A long blue slash, wicked as a whip. The past's tumor would always cling to her. Far better to wear it as a weapon than a wound. Let it grow outward rather than inward. Silco had done it himself—remade himself in the shape of his trauma. He'd cultivated power as an attitude, an aptitude, an armor. He recognized the same need in Jinx.

Emptiness always seeks reinvention.

He remembers the first time she'd asked him to braid her hair. It was too long; she couldn't do it herself. He'd refused, finding it tiresome. But Jinx's bottom lip quivered and her eyes were a tear-sheened reproach. It was a gut-shock to Silco. The knowledge that he was an adult and she a child. A father, with a daughter. To make her happy cost little, in a world where everything cost altogether too much. Would he withhold even the smallest comforts?

Never, Silco vowed.

She already had the breadth of his resources: toolkits and toys, snacks and soaps, clothes and clean sheets. She had the scope of his protection, which ran crazy-wide and so very deep. But most special to her was the gift of his time. They would spend long evenings sitting on the floor together, Jinx cradled spoon-style in his arms, her prattle lapping at his ears. Her hair like two streams of blue riverwater in his hands.

I'll make me a posy of hyssop, no other I can touch. He used to hum it under his breath, the old doggerel an incantation to keep his high-spirited girl still. That all the world may plainly see I love one flower too much.

Afterward, he'd fit his palm across her nape and squeeze. Such a warm spot. So perfectly suited to the size of his hand.

Each time, Silco felt something that the Undercity's rottenness had left him insensate to: the purity of tactile connection. He, whose hands were reduced to a callused mapwork from hammering rocks at the mines. He, whose mind was honed to slit a thousand throats in pursuit of his goal. He, whose heart was mutilated into dead black meat, so all the Shimmer in the Lanes couldn't spark it to life again.

Yet, these moments held a profound simplicity. Like his baptism in the river, but softer. A secret rebirthing.

Then Jinx would giggle: Tickles! Next she'd be on her feet like the silver ball in a pinball machine—ping ping ping—bouncing around in a riot of colors.

Volatile as a powder-keg, his Jinx. Scary-smart, too: a prodigy at crafting weapons of all caliber. Yet the parameters of her psyche stayed those of a damaged child. Matters of deft psychological nuance overheated the wiring in her skull, sending her into a tizzy of gnashing teeth and flailing limbs. It was difficult for her to relate to people as cohesive entities. Rather, they were a jumble of tubes, the living crisscrossed with the dead, each one gushing multicolored emissions like her smoke-bombs.

From Sevika: dirty looks and scathing judgements, their green heat coring a lowdown hole through her insides. From Vi: fists lashing out like battering rams, a pale violet streak of softness blazing into the arterial shades of hatred. From Mylo and Claggor: curses, blackened limbs, bloodstained goggles, mockery that burst into shards of glass.

And from Silco?

Blood. Drugs. Bonemeal.

The first time she'd told him—uncannily quiet, eye-to-eye—Silco couldn't help but smile.

Years sped by. Silco's control over the Undercity expanded crazily, a Shimmer-bright web with himself at the center. His wealth grew in tandem. Yet the Drop remained his base of operations. He never relocated to a swish neighborhood Topside, where the houses looked like pretty gingerbread cakes and the lawns were the checkerboard greens of cookies.

He could have. Just like he could have pulled strings to send Jinx to brighter pastures. Packed her off with a paternal blessing to the blue shores of Kumangra, where she could keep a weather eye on his factories and shoot down wild parrots. Or else gotten her a seat at the School of Techmaturgy: she was cleverer than all their pupils combined, and would look so comely in a graduate's cap. Or, if she wasn't inclined to academics, he could have found her an apprenticeship at one of Shurima's grand old establishments: gizmos and gadgetry a-plenty.

He could have.

Except each scenario was laughable. A subzero monster cannot exist on alien surfaces. It belongs in the absolute blackness that is its lifeblood. Zaun was his lifeblood; a throbbing heart of darkness in which he thrived, and which thrived in him.

Silco would never break free until the Undercity did. Free from Piltover, as a metropolis in its own right.

He could never break free of Jinx, either. She'd grown as twined inside him as Zaun: to rip her out would mean ripping his heart out too. They were inextricable to him, daughter and dream. They both held inside them the same radioactive core of perfection.

And Jinx? She was already perfection in the raw.

The years, under Silco's care, had polished her like a pearl: nacreous and yet bone-crackingly tough. The hard-won lessons at his knee had calcified her moral center the same way. No more tears or trembles. She could toss an incendiary, shadow a target, slit a throat—all with preternatural precision.

Nor had her formal erudition gone remiss. No school—she deserved better than Topside's institutionalized drivel. Her curiosity was limitless. She could hyperfixate on quantum physics at breakfast, then go swooping around at 4.a.m with a contact high from homegrown strains of Blue Walker, all with seemingly no linear progression—until her latest invention fused those slapdash subjects into a blow-out of brilliance.

Silco understood her need for a stimuli-smorgasbord. To the best of his extant resources, he provided. She learnt chemistry from his drug cultivators and corrupt pharmaceutical scientists. She learnt mathematics from his iron welders and professional lockpickers. She learnt local politics from his watering holes where miners, machinists, gunslingers and grifters sat polishing their elbows at the same tables. Silco took her to the opium dens and Shimmer pits, so she understood how to weaponize vice. He took her to the brothels, to show her how sex could be wielded with the same proficiency.

There is power in tapping into the fantasies of others, he told her. In their fantasies, you find their weaknesses. And turn them as thumbscrews to your advantage.

Jinx soaked up every lesson. Then she made them her own, with a vengeance. To the Lanes, her skills were an enigma. Her naysayers remembered a chit of a girl: tangle-footed and high-strung. Now they saw what Silco had, years ago: a force of pure combustive chaos.

Her physical changes left him more ambivalent. Silco had taught her to cultivate a look, a persona. Something to command a presence, and make allies and adversaries stand to attention. She'd certainly taken it to heart. Sloughed off the puppy-fat and grown into her body with a heartstopping beauty that belied its deadliness. Begun bedecking herself in darker clothes, darker shades of make-up, her wardrobe morphing into that of an avant-garde performance artist.

Then came the tattoos. Silco stumbled upon her one afternoon with mystifying clouds spiraling along the bare torso under her crop-top and along the length of her pale arm.

"What are those?" he'd demanded.

She'd tipped him a wink. "Neato, huh? I might do the other side later."

"When exactly did you get them?"

"Ummmm, I dunno? Last week? After the firefight with those Noxian shadow shitheads. I hightailed it to the parlor after giving Sevika the slip."

"And you didn't see fit to inform me?"

"Well: duh! You'd just lecture me in that mean ol' brush-our-teeth and launder-our-money tone of yours."

Silco opened his mouth—doubtless to dole out said lecture—before snapping it shut. Exhaling, he pinched the bridge of his nose. His indignation was moot. The tattoos were already on her body.

Pity. She'd been spared the cruelties that many Zaunites routinely suffered: skin gnawed away by grey-pox, mottled with divots from Enforcer's gunblasts, or crookedly scarred with knife-wounds. Hers was pallidly perfect, like a tablet of the finest soap. It used to fill him with irrational pride; the untouchable purity of her, in contrast to his own wraithlike gauntness.

Proof that he'd given her a better life. Kept her safe.

Kept her intact? That too. For Undercity girls, womanhood was synonymous with victimhood—a premature and brutal initiation. But Jinx was still a virgin; Silco had made it ironclad fact. Men sniffed after her like dogs. But the smart ones never got within close range. The dumb ones found the cold barrel of Silco's bloodlust aimed right at them. Bullseyes blasted into their foreheads.

Oh, he knew the rumors. They made the rounds at the Lanes like sewage circling the drain. Speculations on his and Jinx's relationship—the more sordid, the better. Sex: that's all it devolved to. Rumors that he kept her for his own debased uses. Rumors that they shared the same bed, that he fucked her on his desk between Shimmer-shots. Rumors that he'd spawn monsters by her, a legion of batshit bombshells.

Silco took a special pleasure in showing those rumormongers the suffocations of the grave.

Fatherhood could split a man down two paths. One: it deliquesced the iron out of his spine and bent him into cowardly shapes. Two: that same iron funneled itself into a safeguarding shield. For Silco, it was the second. Even predators are hardwired to protect their young.

Not that Jinx needed it. To throw yourself at her was to charge headlong into mortar shelling. Nothing left behind but shredded muscle and bone. Some might even beg for the honor.

That made Silco proud too: what a lethal cynosure his girl was. It came so naturally to her, but why wouldn't it? Some creatures blazed like comets through the pages of history: catastrophic in their beauty. It was impossible for them to burn less brightly, to live less wildly. They existed as an inferno incarnate.

His little inferno had come a long way from the crybaby he'd taken in. But so had her streak—miles wide—of instability.

She was always a mercurial minx. Blowing hot one moment, cold the next. Ordinarily, Silco found it the ideal tool for terror campaigns. He'd always disdained Piltoverian groupthink, with its bogged-down decision making. His network consisted of independent operators—infused with the zest and fury of his mission, and yet adaptable enough to outthink the enemy on their own terms.

Jinx had that in spades.

But now her deadliness could flip on a dime: creativity swooping up or chaos spiraling down. Sometimes, she was his sweet solacer. After stressful meetings, Silco would find gifts from her—a monkey mug with a false bottom, a doodled-on ashtray with a spring-loaded shiv, a music-box that played infrasonic signals. Other times, she was his most hellacious helpmate. If bad business on the streets left Silco in worse humor in the office, she'd get a queer glow in her eyes, and disappear into the witching hours. Next, Silco would get reports of blazing eruptions at rival warehouses, or Firelights incinerated like ants beneath a giant matchstick.

Once, he'd awoken to the smell of smoke. He sat up in bed, and found Jinx sprawled on top of the covers.

They had separate rooms in the same suite, conjoined by a connecting door. But in childhood, she used to crawl habitually into his room after a nightmare. As a teenager, she'd never outgrown the phase. Silco didn't find it unseemly. He'd grown up in the tenements, his entire family crammed together in a single sunless attic like bats in a cavern. Nor did he regard the bed as a sanctum of sexual intimacy. Since boyhood, he'd slept or smoked or rutted wherever he chose.

Between him and Jinx, the bed was a safe-zone. A place of comfort. Some nights, sniffling and wet-eyed, Jinx would slide under the covers with him. Her skin always felt hot and clammy: like something boiling inside-out. Each time, Silco would wrap his arm around her and whisper softly into her hair.

Hush, my lovely. They can't hurt you now.

Tonight was different. Jinx's clothes were streaked with ash. The ends of her braids were singed. Her knuckles were split bloody, the fingers stained with gunpowder.

Shaking her shoulder, Silco asked roughly, "Where have you been, Jinx?"

"Around."

"By around, you mean: everywhere you shouldn't be?"

"Mmmmyeah."

You can't cause disruptions at whim, child. Not unless I order it."

"Why not?"

"It throws off the balance in the Lanes. Our footing isn't secure enough to show our hand. Not yet."

"Pffffft. Why not?"

"Use your strengths but remember your limitations, Jinx. I always tell you. Remember the cost of rashness: wasted time, squandered alliances, disclosed motives. Better to bait the enemy into showing their hand first."

"That's what I'm doing, silly."

"What?"

She traced her fingertip across the high-buttoned collar of his nightshirt, smudging the expensive fabric with soot. "Keeping 'em on their toes. So they're always second-guessing. So they know that we can do whatever we want to 'em. Anytime. Anyplace."

"Jinx—"

He was cut off by her finger on his lips. Her eyes, ringed in insomniac shadows, were meltingly blue.

"You always keep me safe. Now it's my turn."

Silco stayed silent. Yet something ghosted through the deepest chambers of his dead heart. Pride? No—something far stronger. Something he'd thought had drowned with his old self, dead since he'd opened his ruined eye to this brutal new world.

Loyalty.

(Liability, lodestar, luminary).

Not everyone was as thrilled with Jinx's scorched-earth tactics. Sevika dubbed her a loose cannon on legs. The chem-barons' called her a feral dog. Never to his face, but Silco was the fucking Eye of Zaun. He saw their disquieted glances. He heard the whispers. They said Jinx sidetracked him, throwing the mission off-course. They said her craziness would cost the Undercity its independence.

They forgot that Jinx's bombs were their bread and butter; without her, Topside would've destroyed their territories years ago. They forgot that she could cut a swathe through a dozen Enforcers in an eyeblink: her talent outmatched their finest weapons. They forgot that Silco wielded her status as a wrecking-ball to their collective advantage; the merest glimpse of her sent the Firelights scattering.

They forgot, most of all, that Jinx's power was innate, while theirs stemmed from him. They were addicts, all of them. He gave them power; his price was inked in their blood.

They all owed him, and they all had to pay.

Case in point.

The high-intensity strobes call Silco back to the moment.

At the dancefloor, Jinx turns a pirouette like a ballerina in a music box. Catches him looking, and smiles, a sliver of pearly teeth in the dark. Even from a distance, Silco knows the color in her eyes that presages a kill: the phosphorescent blue that makes the bones light up.

Then she raises an arm, two fingers pointing ceilingward like a gun. Light-show in five, four, three, two, one…

At his shoulder, Sevika hisses, "What the fuck?"

A canister arcs through the darkness. Its target is the table of a chem-baron. Xivic by name, Butcher by reputation. A burn scar in the shape of a X is emblazoned on his bald forehead: the artistic pretensions of an acetylene torch-wielder. Tattoos adorn his brawny arms—an array of blades dripping neon-pink splotches of blood.

Xivic doesn't see the canister coming. His focus is on the dolled-up girl in his arms. One of the Drop's own—a talented little number specializing in milky cuddles. Xivic's mouth is latched onto the nipple of her bare breast. His eyes hang at half-mast: a colostrum coma. His lackeys don't notice the projectile, either. They are busy slopping mouthfuls of Silco's finest Noxian rum down their throats.

Cheap drunks will be cheap drunks, no matter how pricey the brew.

The canister lands with a clattering plop. Xivic's whole body quakes at the first glimpse of it. The girl in his embrace yelps: he must've bitten down. His eyes swivel across the room to meet Silco's. Full of shock, then comprehension. But no loyalty.

He's failed to square the debt. Now the payment is due.

Shadowed in his corner, a shark among scavengers, Silco smiles.

A thin ribbon of smoke furls from the lid. It is followed by a vein of red fire. In the next beat, the table explodes in full scarlet intensity, like a thousand capillaries bursting. The flashbang is intense enough to singe the eyeballs off anyone in Xivic's orbit.

Silco, forewarned, shields his face beneath an upraised arm. Sevika, not forewarned, curses and staves off the glow with the flap of her poncho.

When the detonation dies down, Xivic's table is a blackened cinder. The lackeys are charred effigies; the girl is no better. And the chem-baron? Split into layers of smoking meat. In place of the X on his forehead, there are multicolored curlicues, violently-splattered like a rainbow bursting into alphabet soup.

TRAITOR.

The Drop's lights pulsate at prismatic wavelengths. The music churns its relentless beat. But the club has gone oppressively still. No drinking. No dancing. Below the sharp reek of nitrous, there is a waft of cooked flesh. Almost as an afterthought, someone vomits.

Jinx is long gone.

"What the fuck?!" Sevika says again, a throttled snarl. "Is this her idea of a psychotic joke?"

"Mine, actually."

She rounds on him. "What?"

"Xivic was skimming off our profit margins. Trying to smuggle our Shimmer as his own." Silco exhales smoke through a jagged slit of teeth. "More fool him for showing up tonight."

"A fucking head's up would've been nice."

"Before all else, be armed."

At the bomb-site: feeble movements. Xivic's eyelids twitch in his scorched skull. Then they fly open: stoplight red. A high-pitched shriek issues past his mouth like from a boiling kettle.

"Sweet Janna," Sevika mutters. "He's still alive."

"For the moment."

Slowly, Silco uncoils to his full height. With equal slowness, he goes to Xivic. The club is too dark to cast shadows. Silco's shape, looming across the floor, is darker still: a silhouette carved from purest black, gathering mass and matter with each footstep.

He kneels beside Xivic. The chem-baron's face, what's left of it, is pocked in burns and boils. His breaths come in death-rattling gusts. Silco takes a contemplative pull at his cigar, expelling smoke past his nostrils. His ruined eye glows scouring red through the haze.

"Was it worth it?"

"…puh…puh…puh…"

"Betraying our cause? Betraying me?"

"…puh…ple…please…"

"Where is the container?"

"…please…please…"

"Speak up. I've looked forward to our talk."

"…p-p-pump…s-s-s-station…"

Silco idles a glance at Sevika. "The Pump Station. Have you checked it?"

"Not yet." Sevika's robotic arm torques, as if midway to a mercy-kill. "I'll have the boys take a look."

"Do that."

Silco rises to his feet. Xivic moans and flails out. His flayed hand grabs Silco's polished boot.

In answer, Silco brings his leg up, then down—hard. There is a crunch of bone and a squelch of blood. Xivic howls on a fresh rill of agony. His fingers resemble burnt sausages with the ends bitten off. Silco steps across him, barely appraising his handiwork through half-lidded eyes.

"Sevika," he says. "Get on with it."

Sevika's blade unsheathes from beneath her poncho. She stabs it—quick, efficient—into Xivic's neck. The chem-baron spasms. His red-rimmed eyes roll in their sockets. Then his whole body twitches into stillness. Sevika pulls the blade out. A soupy sickle of blood splashes the floor around hers and Silco's feet.

"Make sure," Silco says, "each vial in that container is accounted for."

"Yes, sir."

From the ceiling, engines rumble to life. The crew have activated the industrial fans. The backdraft whisks embers through the air, smoke diffusing to display the streaks of coagulated blood on the walls. With a jerk of the chin, Silco orders his goons to sop up the mess. They scramble to obey. Others hang back, their rum-scrambled brains jolted into ghost-faced sobriety.

The floorshow was a message—for them as for Xivic—les mots justes to conclude tonight's transaction.

Stay loyal, stay alive.

Turning on his heel, Silco exits the scene, his overcoat flaring out behind him.

His epiphany is forty minutes away.

Chapter two falls sometime next week! Comments are much adored!